


Fly Me To the Moon

by juniorstarcatcher



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Modern Era, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 11:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13680930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniorstarcatcher/pseuds/juniorstarcatcher
Summary: For the past few weeks, an intruder has been sneaking into the museum where Ben Solo works, messing with the planes and simulators of the Air and Space Museum. Tonight, he finally catches her.





	Fly Me To the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yellowdress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowdress/gifts).



This was just _not_ Ben Solo’s day. He should have known when he woke up this morning at his desk in a puddle of calligraphy ink that things weren’t going to go his way. He probably should have guessed things wouldn’t improve when his first tour group (an all-boys’ high school touring the Air and Space museum) wrote on their feedback cards that he was “too much of a space nerd.” And he definitely should have known when his entire lunch fell on the break room floor, leaving him with nothing to eat but stale vending machine pop tarts.

But now, at eight o’clock, with the museum all locked up for the night, he was _certain_ this wasn’t his day.

See, the thing about museums, even museums with as many interactive elements as this one, is that once the people are gone, there really shouldn’t be _any_ noise. The halls should be dark and silent. It was actually one of the reasons Ben loved working until closing. When there was nothing illuminating the museum’s thousands of artifacts but the intruding moon and nothing but the sound of his own footsteps on the linoleum tile.

Tonight, though? Tonight he didn’t hear silence. Well, to be fair, he had blissful silence when he first locked the doors. But on his way out of the building after retrieving his coat, something caught his ear and sunk his stomach. 

The intruder was back.

For weeks now, they’d been playing a game of cat and mouse, he and this… this… scoundrel. He’d close up the museum and then halfway to escaping the place for the night, he’d almost manage to catch sight of an intruder. Sometimes they were doing inane things, like touring the space wing with a box of popcorn that he’d have to inevitably pick up when she dropped it while fleeing from his pursuing feet. Other times, things seemed more sinister, like the time he caught them attempting to flip the fuses for the aeronautics simulators. 

He’d reported it to the security staff several times, but his fellow tour-guide, the persnickety Armitage Hux who constantly wore the expression of a man who had a foul smell under his nose, told him he was crazy. According to the security footage, there were a few moving shadows, but no actual _person_. That was the problem. Ben had never managed to get a real glimpse of them. They were fast, quicker than he’d ever be, and every time he tried to track them down, they eluded him, slipping through an errant opened window or a broken air duct in what Ben thought was a locked basement.

But tonight, he was going to prove Hux wrong. He was going to prove that the intruder _was_ real. He was going to capture him.

He moved through the museum’s hallways, stepping lightly to avoid detection as he followed the sound. Tonight’s sounds were not the normal sounds of sneaking and creeping. As he drew nearer and nearer to his apparently oblivious prey, Ben realized they weren’t incidental sounds at all. They were purposeful, and they echoed in the cavernous Hall of Aviation, where rising staircases took the patrons up into the air to better examine the triumphs of engineering hanging from titanium cables from the ceiling. Ben entered, struck as he always was with awe by the four-ton planes hanging in open defiance of gravity, but this time he was also struck by something else.

The sound of a voice. A woman’s voice. A soft, warm voice made rough by the thrill of an imagined battle.

“We’re coming in hot! I’m going to try to evade them, but you’ll have to be ready to shoot them out of the sky!”

The shouting continued, echoing in the lofty atrium as he made his way up the staircases, around World War I bi-planes and B-17 bombers alike. Finally, he made it to the third level, where he spotted her, confirming his worst fears. She wasn’t just hanging out in the Boeing Hall; she was sitting _in_ one of the planes. And not just any plane, the most important one. _The Interceptor_ , a World War II fighter jet that was the museum’s second-most prized possession. How she’d managed to get from the staircase landing into the plane’s jump-seat, he’d never know, but it was an amazing feat that almost earned her some credit in his eyes.

When he finally came parallel with the plane, standing on the landing and pressing up against the railing to see her better, two things happened at the same time. One, he realized he was wildly unprepared to confront an intruder who was bold enough to sit in a war hero’s plane.

And two… She was beautiful. Devastatingly so. Even in the throes of a fake battle, where she barked orders to an invisible co-pilot and her fingers shook as they took hold of the piloting controls, she struck him in a way he’d never been struck before. Her long, brown and impossibly soft-looking brown hair was tied away from her delicate features in three buns, revealing a strikingly beautiful face contorted in a rage as she shot down her ghostly adversaries. Facing straight ahead, he couldn’t see her eyes, but he both hoped and dreaded the prospect that they would be as arresting as the rest of her.

He also regretted that he’d gone twenty-eight nights of seeing nothing but her shadow when _this_ was the woman he’d been chasing. If he’d realized she would possess him so suddenly and so completely, he probably would have run harder to catch her.

Desperate to dispel _that_ thought from his head, he tried to channel his prior rage at her. _Remember, she’s the reason Hux has been calling you crazy. She’s been sneaking out for weeks and it’s time she learns her lesson._

“You!”

If it weren’t for the thousand-ton cables keeping the ship in place, the way she jumped in shock at the intrusion of his voice would have sent the machine flipping. A hand flew to her chest and she turned on him with a murderous rage in her eyes.

“You can’t sneak up on someone like that when they’re eighty feet off of the ground!”

" _You_ can’t be eighty feet off of the ground! Or in that plane!

“Well, none of you will let me do it during the day!”

He almost choked on his own incredulous laughter as he folded his arms across his chest and raised an eyebrow at her. He’d been right about her eyes. Totally entrancing, as if they were fresh stars in a perfectly black night sky, calling to him across a sea of darkness.

“None of us let you jump in the five million dollar antique plane?”

“...When you put it that way…” She cleared her throat, staring down at her hands instead of meeting his gaze. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough to know you probably took down a hundred imaginary Germans.” He sniffed, crossing his arms tighter across his ribcage to keep his heart from flying straight out of it and into her hands. “You have to get out of there.”

“Why? So you can have me arrested?”

 _Yes. No. Maybe_ . He fought with himself, all while knowing he could never call the cops on her. Not when she was looking at him like that, with all the hope and scepticism in her trained squarely on him. Finally, he shook his head. A sign of defeat if there ever was one, but he didn’t feel defeated. Instead, he found himself battling a wave of excitement and confusion, both fueled by this strange, beautiful creature sitting in _The Interceptor_ , a ship salvaged from the wreckage of what the American Army Air Force called _Operation Coruscant_ and repaired to its original 1945 glory by hand. Restoring the ship was actually how Ben, a rebellious youth who wouldn’t stop growing his black hair long and rejecting his family’s legacy, came to be the world’s biggest air and space nerd. His mother found out about the restoration project and forced him to spend his Saturdays at the museum. Ten years later, here he was, no longer a tough-mouthed, sad-eyed volunteer, but a Senior Docent, second in line for the head of the Museum. “I’m not going to have you arrested.”

She didn’t look so sure. Her large eyes examined him. “You swear?” He nodded. “I don’t believe you.”

“I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks. I wouldn’t just hand you over to the police, alright?”

Her brow furrowed and Ben instantly wanted to leap over the space between them and run his fingers across her soft skin to smooth the wrinkled space between her eyes. “You’ve been tracking _me_ down? What do you want with me?”

“You’ve been sneaking around,” he accused, trying to remain professional even as his stomachs performed an Olympic skating routine, complete with flips and triple axels.

“I have not been _sneaking_. I have been…” The stranger trailed off before tipping her chin up as though she were teaching him something he didn’t, but absolutely should have known. It was the first time her accent- British, he thought- grew especially pronounced. “Look, your museum is expensive.”

“And?”

“And you have terrible security. And…” She lowered her voice until he could barely hear her. “I want to learn how to fly one of these things.”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, _oh_?”

“You’ve been trying to learn how to fly?”

“You have simulators and plenty of planes to go around. Flight school is even more expensive than your stupid museum.”

It made complete sense, all of it. Her rummaging through the flight suits, her constant attempts to flip the breakers on the simulators, the pretend battle she’d been engaged in tonight in _The Interceptor_. Suddenly, he saw her in her full and completeness, no longer just her eyes or the cupid’s bow of her pink lips. He realized she was wearing ripped jeans and an old t-shirt, nothing that was strong enough to combat the rough winter winds outside. She was sneaking around because she was too poor to afford nice clothes, much less flight training.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but…” He swallowed hard, looking at _The Interceptor_ to stop his heart from bleeding for her. “I really need you to get out of the plane. Please.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the most important one.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Because it was my grandfather’s plane.”

Her face went sheet-white. Her jaw dropped. That usually happened. “You’re Anakin Skywalker’s grandson?”

For his part, his cheeks reddened and he rubbed the back of his neck, trying not to look too bashful. Everyone just _loved_ to hear the old stories about the glory days of his family. One of the reasons he loved the museum was because here, no one knew his last name. He just got to be the space nerd who did overly enthusiastic voice-overs during the Planetarium show.

“And Han Solo’s son. Yeah. Might as well just get that out there.”

“Han Solo, the smuggler?” She asked, her voice breathless and thrilled.

“War hero,” he rolled his eyes. “He prefers to be called Han Solo, the war hero.”

“Wow.”

At this news, Rey sat back in the jump seat as if the sudden revelation of this knowledge had exhausted all of her senses, as if she really had just been in a battle for her life and she barely made it out alive. He followed her gaze as they caught on something, a little card in the plane’s instrument reading panel. A picture of a dark-haired woman, her long brown locks twisted in an intricate hairstyle around a crown. Ben’s chest tightened as it always did when he looked at it. They’d found the photograph of Queen Padme, a refugee royal to whom his grandfather had been assigned to protect during The War, in the wreckage of the plane and he’d insisted that it be kept in the ship instead of put in its own display. His grandfather had loved Padme and married her; he’d gone to war for her. It didn’t seem right to separate the photograph from the place where he’d put it, in the one place in the plane he would always be looking.

He cleared his throat to combat a wave of emotion.

“So, it just would mean a lot to me. You know, if you would just… If you would come out of the plane for me.”

Thankfully, she understood the shift of his mood and acquiesced.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” She stood in the ship’s cockpit, before shooting him an apologetic wince. “You might want to step back.”

“Why would I-”

But before he could finish the sentence, she used the cord on the plane’s wing to swing herself with all of the careless grace of a practiced acrobat….

Directly into Ben’s arms. Instinct and the overwhelming desire to bring her close to him forced his limbs to wrap around and hold her close as he staggered backwards, trying to quash her momentum.

“Oof!”

When she realized what she’d done, she looked up at him, still nestled in his embrace.

“Sorry. I didn’t…”

“It’s fine. Really.”

And he meant it. Their eyes locked for too long a moment before she cleared her throat and, remembering herself, pulled out of his embrace. His arms felt empty without her in them.

“I guess I should go. Thanks.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “For not calling the cops.”

Just like that, she was sprinting down the stairs, running so fast her oversized, thrift-store t-shirt trailed behind her like the train of an escaping Cinderella’s ball gown. Ben knew he had a choice to make. No, it wasn’t really a choice at all. He couldn’t let her go. If she walked out and he never saw her again, he wouldn’t forgive himself.

“Wait!”

She stopped, turned, and looked up at him from the base of the staircase.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t given any of the simulators a go in a long time. And they’re definitely better if you have someone to fly against.”

The air crackled with electricity and the promise of beautiful, uncertain things to come. She raised an eyebrow.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Only if you think you can handle it.”

She smiled for the first time. Brilliant and heart-stealing.

 “You’re on, Solo.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Reylo fic exchange to all of us, but especially my recipient! Thank you for such a fun prompt! 
> 
> I really enjoyed writing this one, so please let me know how I did and please leave kudos and a review if you enjoyed it!


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